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In the late night of April 7 1990, a devastating fire broke out aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Inadequate crew training combined with malfunctioning safety doors accelerated the propagation of the flames, while deadly hydrogen cyanide gas emitted from burning laminates led to the loss of 159 people. Initially, the disaster was attributed to a traveler—a lorry driver with a history of fire-setting. Since this suspect too perished in the incident and was not able to refute the accusations, the complete truth about the event remained concealed for many years. Only in 2020 that a detailed documentary revealed the fire was likely started deliberately as part of an fraud scheme.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Series: An Overview

In the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star series, the preceding volume, an unnamed protagonist is traveling on a public transport through Copenhagen when she observes an older man on the street. As the bus moves away, she experiences an “eerie sense” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Driven to retrace the route in pursuit of him, the narrator enters a landscape that is both alien and deeply familiar. She introduces readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the burdens of their troubled histories. In the final pages of that book, it is implied that the source of Kurt's discontent may originate in a poor financial decision made on his account by a man referred to as T.

The Devil Book: An Unconventional Approach

The Devil Book opens with an extended prose poem in which the narrator describes her challenge to compose T's story. “In this volume, two,” she states, “we were meant / to follow him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the news that / the fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had effectively been / ignited.” Burdened by the task she has set herself and derailed by the pandemic, she approaches the tale indirectly, as a type of allegory. “It occurred to me / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my work / this is / for you / this is / an sensational story / about businessmen and / the dark force.”

A narrative slowly emerges of a female character who experiences quarantine in the UK capital with a virtual stranger and during those days relates to him what happened to her a ten years earlier, when she accepted an offer from a man who professed to be the devil to grant all her wishes, so long as she didn't doubt his intentions. As the threads of the two stories become more interwoven, we start to suspect that they are one and the same—or at the very least that the nature of T is legion, for there are demonic forces everywhere.

Another blaze is present: an ardent, magnetic dedication to literature as a political act

Deals with the Devil: A Thematic Exploration

Literature teach us that it is the devil who does bargains, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our risk. But suppose the narrator herself is the malevolent force? A third storyline comes finally to light—the story of a young woman whose childhood was marred by mistreatment and who was placed in a mental health facility, under duress to comply with social expectations or suffer more of the same. “[This entity] understands that in the scenario you've created for it, there are a pair of results: submit or stay a beast.” A alternative path is finally unveiled through a collection of poems to the night that are also a call to arms against the forces of wealth and power.

Connections and Readings: From Fiction to Real Events

Many UK readers of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star books will reflect immediately of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which, though unintentional in cause, bears similarities in that the resulting disaster and fatalities can be attributed at in part to the dangerous trade-off of prioritizing profit over human lives. In these first two volumes of what is projected to be a seven-book sequence, the fire on board the ship and the chain of fraudulent business deals that culminated in mass murder are a sinister background element, showing themselves only in brief flashes of information or inference yet casting a growing influence over everything that transpires. Some readers may doubt how much it is possible to read this volume as a independent piece, when its aim and meaning are so intricately bound into a broader whole whose final form, at present, is uncertain.

Innovative Prose: Ethics and Aesthetics Intertwined

There will be others—and I include myself as among them—who will become enamored with the author's project purely as written art, as truly experimental literature whose moral and artistic purpose are so deeply entwined as to make them inextricable. “Compose verses / for we require / that as well.” Another kind of blaze exists: an intense, attractive commitment to writing as a statement. I intend to persist to pursue this series, wherever it goes.